SHUFFLE MASTER FINDS GROWTH – AND STRENGTH – IN NEW AREAS
S
ome eyebrows were raised earlier in 2011 when Gavin Isaacs left slot giant Bally to take the reins at Shuffle Master – but it’s a move that makes perfect sense, as Roger Snow, Executive Vice President at Shuffle Master, explains. “If you go back 20 years, Shuffle Master was a shuffler company, then it become a shuffler and table game company.
The company was built around those two product lines; the collective intellect was comprised of people who understand what goes on in the pit of a casino – table games, shufflers, chippers. The brains of the company all worked toward that. But as the company has grown and matured, it has expanded into other areas; around half of our revenue now comes from slot machines and electronic table games. One of the things you need in order to continue growth is to have the correct talent, the right intellect in the company – you need people that understand slot machines and understand electronic table games, which have some crossover with slots anyway. Corporately at Shuffle Master, we were mostly table games guys, for example. You need someone that understands this new business – and Gavin Isaacs, our new CEO with his background at Bally and Aristocrat, has exactly that knowledge. With this in mind it’s an exciting appointment for the company, as slots are a rapidly
Roger Snow, Executive Vice President
growing part of their business, second only to shufflers – though they are not distributed in North America. The bulk of the slots business is in Australia, as Roger continued: “The results in Australia have been very good and we have focussed on that market. It’s a great
market to be in, but it of course has a finite capacity so our team is looking forward to expanding into Latin America and Asia. We think there’s good business to be had in those markets.” It’s worth noting that a large proportion of Shuffle Master’s assets are intellectual
property – which makes them perfect for development online, as the company aims to take its proprietary table games to the Internet. It’s a bold move, but is being managed in the right way as Shuffle Master has looked outside casino gaming to develop the product suite, with an appointment from console gaming giants Electronic Arts overseeing development. Roger elaborates: “We’re licensing legal online casinos to use our content, and we’re also developing our own content. Part of our strategy is predicated on the fact that eventually – within five or six years – the US will legalise. “We’re also looking at social gaming, on
Facebook for example, plus downloadable apps for iPad and iPhones. We’re not expecting to make a huge amount of money from this, rather it’s about making the games ubiquitous – if you see our games everywhere you go, it can’t not translate into the casino. People will play online then when they’re in the casino they are more likely to sit down and play them.” This also allows the company to refine its game development, bringing a time- and
Gavin Isaacs, CEO
labour-intensive process down to perhaps as little as one week. “We can take our games online to the Facebook environment and quickly get feedback from players; we’ll be able to take a process that usually takes, say, six months, to taking just a week online. Our games are often tweaked and changed when they are tested out in the field, but this brings that time right down and allows us to get a finished product out much faster. It will take time before it contributes revenue, but we certainly see this as a big part of the company’s future.”
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